This is my curator freakout about the You Are Here Festival in 2013

I’ve been involved with both the 2011 and 2012 festivals, and I can say without a glimmer of doubt that this is the most intense, challenging and exciting of the three. In 2011 there were two curators (Yolande Norris and myself). In 2012 it was two again (Yolande and Hadley). Now in 2013, there are six: Nick Delatovic, myself, Hadley, Sarah Kaur, Yolande Norris and Vanessa Wright. The program is bigger, denser and broader, with more art forms and events than ever before. We have somewhere between 80-110 events in the schedule at the moment, including a sleep-over durational performance night, a live mix tape for Canberra, a cross-media collaboration with the National Film & Sound Archive, a zine fair, an unseasonal laneway Christmas party and a series of after-work concerts to be matched with tea.

As an example of the weird ways in which the festival has grown and evolved, this year the You Are Here theatre stream has become its own festival-within-a-festival, operating under the strange title of ‘The Ice Age’. The Ice Age features an array of 20 different shows by local and interstate ensembles including the Landlords, Shadowhouse PITS, NUTS, Freshly Ground Theatre, Cathy Petocz and the Masters of Space and Time. Every night of You Are Here (and a lot of the days as well) there will be a new theatre double- or triple-bill in the festival’s dedicated hub space. The shows range in length from 3 minutes to 30, and include one-on-one interactive performances, high-energy farce, puppetry, physical theatre and science performance.

All over the city, all through the ten-day program, there’ll be strange and pretty things cropping up everywhere (all of it free) and our biggest hope is that you are able to come along and dig some of the diversity.

You can dig into more about the festival at youareherecanberra.com.au, or hit us up on Facebook and Twitter. Festival programs will be available online and distributed around the city in February.

That’s all, except that I hope your 2013 is radical so far and keeps getting more so.

Sounds engaging. Except for the tea bit. I noticed some lovely young poets drinking tea at an event in this festival last year, and asked myself what has gone wrong with the world? And when exactly did this happen? (-: